In short: Influencer (2022)

Professional influencer Madison (Emily Tennant) finds herself alone on a backpacking – or whatever the rich people’s version of that sort of thing is called – trip in Thailand. Initially, the trip was planned as an outing with her boyfriend, the impossibly self-centred Ryan (Rory J. Saper), but he noped out of the trip at the last minute, for vague reasons that clearly bother Madison quite a bit. Now alone in a foreign country, Madison has trouble keeping up her façade as well as is part of her job description.

Consequently, she’s very happy when she meets a non-creepy friendly face in CW (Cassandra Naud), whom she meets in a way that’ll only feel forced later. The two young women become very friendly rather quickly indeed. CW uses her copious local knowledge, highly developed social skills, and rather less strict philosophy of life in ways bound to impress Madison. This sort of instant closeness between the two makes it perfectly reasonable for a woman to accompany her new friend to some uninhabited island. Surely, CW has nothing sinister in mind.

Which would make for a rather boring movie, and thankfully, Kurtis David Harder’s influencer thriller is anything but. Apart from being rather clever about the influencer business, the film leaves the satire or the snarling towards influencers to other movies of the sub-genre and focusses more on deeper thematic concerns about the nature of intimacy fake and real, exemplified through CW’s relationship to everyone she meets but also the way Madison’s friends and acquaintances relate to her to her face and behind her back, in ways that are rather more subtly disturbing than “influencer=bad” would be. In fact, the film seems very much concerned with the fakeness at the core of all human relations any of its characters have, so much so that it becomes increasingly difficult not to side with the objectively monstrous CW because she’s so utterly brilliant at faking it. That feeling is even further strengthened by how good Naud’s performance is, magnetic in exactly the way her character is supposed to be, with suggestions of a depth you’d rather not want to explore.

Influencer presents these concerns – naturally, logically and thematically appropriately – under a highly glossy and slick surface that’s so effective, even the nastier moments of violence have something of a sexy sheen, which makes them more effectively disturbing, and turns this into something particularly difficult to achieve: a thriller that is as glossy as it is intelligent.